The Best Season Of The Year Is Here For Many Reasons

Today, June 21st, 2023 is an exciting day for me, and I'm sure many others as well (sorry to those of you who are fans of winter.) This day is the first day of summer, or as the United States National Weather Service calls it, the Summer Solstice.

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Either way, all it means to me is three months of bliss. That's three full months. I get a bit angry when Labor Day arrives and many are basically kicking summer to the curb before it's even over. We'll talk about the autumn season when it gets here on September 23rd.

Today is the longest day of the year, with 15 hours and 18 minutes of daylight hours for the Binghamton, New York area. Sunrise was 5:26 am and sunset, 8:44 pm. I'm loving every minute of it.

Interesting facts about the summer solstice from the weather.com website:

The Earth spins on an axis tilted 23.5 degrees from the Earth's orbit around the sun. As a result, the most direct sunlight shifts between a band of latitudes on the Earth. Throughout the year, providing the change of seasons we know in the middle and higher latitudes. At solar noon on Wednesday, the sun will be directly over the Tropic of Cancer, a line of latitude located at 23.5 degrees north of the equator. - weather.come exact moment each year when the North Pole is most directly oriented toward the sun.

I love a lot of daylight, but I don't think I'd want to deal with the amount that locations like, say, Fairbanks, Alaska gets during the summer. For example, on the first day of summer (June 21st), sunrise was at 2:57 am and sunset at 12:47 am on June 22nd.

Wow, that's 21 hours and 50 minutes of daylight. On the opposite side of the spectrum, according to the Time and Date website, that's 18 hours and 8 minutes longer daylight than Fairbanks gets on the Winter Solstice in December.

But the Summer Solstice isn't just to enjoy the longest day of the year or to simply mark the beginning of summer as you will see from this report from Stonehenge in the United Kingdom.

So, happy summer, and I hope yours is filled with fun, relaxation and plenty of sunshine. Enjoy it before it's gone.